They're all just wild about Pebble

US OPEN:SOME THINGS simply take your breath away. Sure, your lungs ache after cycling up a hill, or even after running for a bus; but, as you stand on the stretch of golf holes hanging out over the edge of the Monterey peninsula with the Pacific and the million dollar yachts as a backdrop, your heart skips a beat and there's an involuntary intake of breath as you adjust to something rather special.

In truth, there’s no golf course on this earth like Pebble Beach. And the 110th US Open has, again, proved it! Ian Poulter, who’d never ventured this far west to take in the ATT National Pro-Am, the US Tour’s regular stop-off on this isthmus, didn’t fully appreciate the effect of standing on the Cliffs of Doom – that stretch from the eighth hole to the 10th – or atop the sheer drop at the back of the 17th green and 18th tee box until this week.

As Poulter, who’d spent much of his final practice round on Wednesday extricating his camera phone from his bag so that he could take photographs, put it: “It’s better than everything I read. I mean, you try and get some visual but there’s nothing like playing it for real. It’s very different than what it obviously looks like on a video game.”

And Lee Westwood confessed, “I loved Pebble Beach the first time I saw it.”

For sure, everyone is smitten by Pebble Beach, a magnificent test of golf in a quite spectacular location unlike anywhere else on the planet. Ernie Els, cast in the role of principal onlooker to the master class provided by Tiger Woods a decade ago, observed, “as a venue, I don’t think you can get a better one any place in the world.”

Stewart Cink, the British Open champion, is a bit of a sentimentalist when it comes to the links. “If St Andrews is the home of golf, I think Pebble Beach kind of feels like the home of American golf. I know other places probably disagree with that, like Pinehurst would probably lay claim to that, but Pebble Beach feels like the home of championship golf. It predates even the US Open (being) played here, (starting) with the Crosby Clambake. It has a real sense of history here, so many shots we’ve seen over the years by Watson, Nicklaus, Tiger.”

There’s a queue of players who will utter similar sentiments. Pádraig Harrington, a regular visitor to the ATT where he traditionally tees it up alongside JP McManus, remarked: “It seems a little bit like the home of the US Open. We come back every ten years or so but it is a little bit like St Andrews, (the British Open) going back there every five years. It’s one of those venues that stands out in people’s minds. Everybody remembers Tom Watson chipping in (in 1982), Tiger winning by 15 shots (in 2000), Tom Kite getting to 10-under-par. There’s so many things that go on on this golf course. For all of the venues of the US Open, this is more synonymous with the US Open than any other.”

Watson, whose chip-in birdie in the final round of the 1982 US Open was one of those shots heard around the world, doesn’t need any convincing about the magical appeal. “It’s got a lot of stories, a lot of stories about it . . . . it has a rich fabric of golf and the US Open should come back. It’s a wonderful venue.”

Although hailing from Kansas, Watson – apart from his US Open victory – has a rich association with Pebble Beach. When he attended Stanford University in San Francisco, he played the links more than a dozen times and he recalls playing the US PGA here in 1977 when “we had cracks in the fairway and it was really, really dry.”

Of course, Watson has one record all of his own: he is the only player to have played in each one of the five US Open staged on the course, courtesy of a special invite extended to him for this one by the USGA. He made the most of it, making the cut and proving, as he did at Turnberry last year, there is plenty of life left in the old bones.

What’s more, the USGA has announced that the US Open will be coming back here, for more lung-busting intakes of breath from players and spectators alike. It will return in 2019, the 100th anniversary of the Pebble Beach links which, although ostensibly a public course open to one and all, has a green fee of $495 with a mandatory proviso of a two-night stay at one of the resort’s hotels.

There have been many famous shots hit at Pebble Beach. Watson’s chip-in, of course, from deep rough in ’82 to stun Nicklaus. Then, there was Nicklaus’ own one-iron which hit the flag on that same 17th hole on his way to a third US Open title in ’72. There was Kite’s pitch in a howling wind on the seventh en route to victory in 1992, and there was Woods’s slash with a seven-iron out of the deep rough on the sixth to reach the par five in two in 2000.

But the best shot of all? How about Jack Lemmon’s in the 1981 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am. The actor’s opening tee shot flew off the toe of his driver, zinged over the head of the spectators, found a gap through the trees and finished up in his own house.

Ah, the magical appeal of Pebble Beach.